• Question: what is the best practical you have ever done

    Asked by Emstar to Alice, Bose, Christian, Emma, Steve on 4 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Alice Harpole

      Alice Harpole answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      As a computational astrophysicist, it’s been a few years since I’ve done any practical experiments. However, during my undergraduate degree I did some materials science which had some really great practicals. Typically, we got to smash things up, melt things and set samples on fire (this helped us to learn more about the materials).

    • Photo: Christian Killow

      Christian Killow answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      Building the LISA Pathfinder optical bench! OK that’s cheating a bit, it took us ten years and wasn’t exactly a lab experiment of the kind you’re probably thinking of. It was good, though.

      I like playing with lasers, so experiments like Young’s double slit and the like appeal to me. It is superb to be able to make predictions using equations that you have derived from first principals, turn the laser on, and see that you were right!

    • Photo: Emma Dean

      Emma Dean answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      I got to experiment with superconductors when I was at York. That was really fun. We made magnets float and spin in electrical fields. We had to use liquid nitrogen to cool the magnets down enough for the superconducting effects to work. This made the experiment even better, as we spent most of our time freezing things with the liquid nitrogen and then smashing them up!

    • Photo: Steve Marsden

      Steve Marsden answered on 4 Mar 2016:

      I’m in a similar boat to Alice, spending most of my days coding. In my undergrad my favourite experiment to perform was Kater’s pendulum, which is oddly fitting to this zone, as it was used for measuring the local acceleration due to gravity. It uses a fairly complicated pendulum which is accurate enough to see the difference in gravity between the ground floor and the fourth floor of a building. I was then lucky enough to demonstrate the same experiment a few years later to the next generation of students.

    • Photo: Benjamin Bose

      Benjamin Bose answered on 5 Mar 2016:

      The last time I did a practical was over 5 years ago and after some thought the only one which stands out is where I measured Newton’s gravitational constant G using some masses (I’m excluding all the exhilarating pendulum practicals I remember with immense fondness!).

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